Semi-Detached Mapping by John Donaldson.

Below is an essay on my series SEMI-DETACHED written by John Donaldson from MEATYARD ARTS.

Semi Detached Mapping
The Photographs of Mark Page.

"Mark Page’s series of photographs, an inventory of the ‘semidetached’ form, I regard as part of what can be described as ‘visual anthropology’, providing as this series of pictures does, an opportunity to reflect upon the significance of the semi detached house within England’s social narrative in the 20th century.
In a letter to a BBC producer in the late 1960’s, John Betjeman likened the suburbs and the semidetached housing that typified them, as places where ‘Everybody aspired to a little country house of their own’.
The enduring attraction of ‘the semi’ owes much to this near mythic status it holds within the English narrative – a diminutive fantasy drawn from the same potent bottle as castles, baronial mansions and gentrified weavers cottages." CONTINUED HERE.